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To
this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain types of
deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians.
If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the
prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make
theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.
But
such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of an
empirical evolution. Nothing is
more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and
religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social
arrangements progressively develop. After
an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to
notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory:
the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no
longer be believed in. Today a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to
placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in
his favor, we would not look at them. Once,
on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials.
They
positively recommended him to men's imaginations in ages when such coarse
signs of power were respected and no others could be understood.
Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished.
Doubtless
historic accidents always played some later part, but the original factor in
fixing the figure of the gods must always have been psychological.
The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who founded the
particular cult bore witness was worth something to them personally. They
could use him. He guided their
imagination, warranted their hopes, and controlled their will--or else they
required him as a safeguard against the demon and a curber of other people's
crimes. In any case, they chose
him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them to yield.
So
soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless; so soon as they conflicted
with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted too extensively other values;
so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible, or immoral when reflected
on, the deity grew discredited, and was erelong neglected and forgotten.
It was in this way that the Greek and Roman gods ceased to be
believed in by educated pagans; it is thus that we ourselves judge of the
Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan theologies; Protestants have so dealt with
the Catholic notions of deity, and liberal Protestants with older Protestant
notions; it is thus that Chinamen judge of us, and that all of us now living
will be judged by our descendants. When
we cease to admire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we end
by deeming that deity incredible.
Few
historic changes are more curious than these mutations of theological
opinion. The monarchical type
of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our
own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity
seems positively to have been required by their imagination.
They called the cruelty "retributive justice," and a God
without it would certainly have struck them as not "sovereign"
enough. But today we abhor the
very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing-out
of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan
Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a
"delightful conviction," as of a doctrine "exceeding
pleasant, bright, and sweet," appears to us, if sovereignly anything,
sovereignly irrational and mean. Not
only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believed in by
earlier centuries also strikes later centuries with surprise. We shall see examples of it from the annals of Catholic
saintship which makes us rub our Protestant eyes.
Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as
well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of
an almost absurdly childish character, taking delight in toy-shop furniture,
tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his
"glory" incomprehensibly enhanced thereby:--just as on the other
hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to
ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems
intolerably bald and chalky and bleak.
Luther,
says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his theses
to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were destined to
lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.
So
far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our pretensions to
empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological probability of
our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other men's religion,
yet this very standard has been begotten out of the drift of common life.
It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning
all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be
advancing. Experience, if we
take it in the largest sense, is thus the parent of those disbeliefs which,
it was charged, were inconsistent with the experiential method.
The inconsistency, you see, is immaterial, and the charge may be
neglected.
If
we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there is
not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method. The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the
gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and
on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test
saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how
far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity.
If it commends itself, then any theological beliefs that may inspire
it, in so far forth will stand accredited.
If not, then they will be discredited, and all without reference to
anything but human working principles.
It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of
the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history
candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever
in the long run established or proved itself in any other way.
Religions have APPROVED themselves; they have ministered to sundry
vital needs which they found reigning.
When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths
came which served the same needs better, the first religions were
supplanted.
The
needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp.
So the reproach of vagueness and subjectivity and "on the
whole"-ness, which can with perfect legitimacy be addressed to the
empirical method as we are forced to use it, is after all a reproach to
which the entire life of man in dealing with these matters is obnoxious.
No religion has ever yet owed its prevalence to "apodictic
certainty." In a later lecture I will ask whether objective
certainty can ever be added by theological reasoning to a religion that
already empirically prevails.
One
word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort of an empirical
method we are handing ourselves over to systematic skepticism.
Since
it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments and needs, it
would be absurd to affirm that one's own age of the world can be beyond
correction by the next age. Skepticism
cannot, therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility
against which their conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim
exemption from this universal liability.
But to admit one's liability to correction is one thing, and to
embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another.
Of willfully playing into the hands of skepticism we cannot be
accused. He who acknowledges
the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance <326> for it
in discussing his observations, is in a much better position for gaining
truth than if he claimed his instrument to be infallible.
Or is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact
for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable?
And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology
really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable
probability for her conclusions? If
WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the
truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty
surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our
liability to err.
Nevertheless,
dogmatism will doubtless continue to condemn us for this confession.
The mere outward form of inalterable certainty is so precious to some
minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of the question.
They will claim it even where the facts most patently pronounce its
folly. But the safe thing is
surely to recognize that all the insights of creatures of a day like
ourselves must be provisional. The wisest of critics is an altering being,
subject to the better insight of the morrow, and right at any moment, only
"up to date" and "on the whole."
When larger ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to
open ourselves to their reception, unfettered by our previous pretensions.
"Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive."
The
fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore entirely
unescapable, whatever may be one's own desire to attain the irreversible.
But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question awaits us, the
question whether men's opinions ought to be expected to be absolutely
uniform in this field. Ought
all men to have the same religion? Ought they to approve the same fruits and
follow the same leadings? Are
they so like in their inner needs that, for hard and soft, for proud and
humble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy-minded and despairing, exactly
the same religious incentives are required?
Or are different functions in the organism of humanity allotted to
different types of man, so that some may really be the better for a religion
of consolation and reassurance, whilst others are better for one of terror
and reproof? It might
conceivably be so; and we shall, I think, more and more suspect it to be so
as we go on. And if it be so, how can any possible judge or critic help
being biased in favor of the religion by which his own needs are best met?
He aspires to impartiality; but he is too close to the struggle not
to be to some degree a participant, and he is sure to approve most warmly
those fruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most
nourishing to HIM.
I
am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound.
Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair
of the very notion of truth. But
I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the
details which lie before us. I
do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given
day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of
fact as those with which religions deal.
But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in
intellectual instability. I am
no lover of disorder and doubt as such.
Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it
already wholly. That we can
gain more and more of it by moving always in the right direction, I believe
as much as any one, and I hope to bring you all to my way of thinking before
the termination of these lectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably
against the empiricism which I profess.
I
will waste no more words, then, in abstract justification of my method, but
seek immediately to use it upon the facts.
In
critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very important
to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual personal
function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product.
I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture.
The word "religion," as ordinarily used, is equivocal.
A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses
attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers.
When these groups get strong enough to "organize"
themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions
of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then
apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing; so that when
we hear the word "religion" nowadays, we think inevitably of some
"church" or other; and to some persons the word "church"
suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of
superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying that
they are "down" on religion altogether. Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches
than our own from the general condemnation.
But
in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at
all. The religious experience
which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private
breast. First-hand individual
experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of
innovation to those who witnessed its birth.
Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it has always, for a
time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the
literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St.
Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go.
George Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no better at
this point than read to you a page from his Journal, referring to the period
of his youth when religion began to ferment within him seriously.
"I
fasted much," Fox says, "walked abroad in solitary places many
days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places
until night came on; and frequently in the night walked mournfully about by
myself; for I was a man of sorrows in the time of the first workings of the
Lord in me.
"During
all this time I was never joined in profession of religion with any, but
gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil company, taking leave
of father and mother, and all other relations, and traveled up and down as a
stranger on the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a
chamber to myself in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes more,
sometimes less in a place: for
I durst not stay long in a place, being afraid both of professor and
profane, lest, being a tender young man, I should be hurt by conversing much
with either. For which reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenly
wisdom and getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward
things, to rely on the Lord alone. As
I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those
called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all
that could speak to my condition. And
when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone so that I had nothing
outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a
voice which said, 'There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy
condition.' When I heard it, my
heart did leap for joy. Then
the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my
condition. I had not fellowship with any people, priests, nor professors,
nor any sort of separated people. I
was afraid of all carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but
corruptions. When I was in the
deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome; my
troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great that I often thought
I should have despaired, I was so tempted.
But when Christ opened to me how he was tempted by the same devil,
and had overcome him, and had bruised his head; and that through him and his
power, life, grace, and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in
him. If I had had a king's
diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been as nothing, for nothing
gave me comfort but the Lord by his power.
I saw professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in that
condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been
rid of. But the Lord did stay
my desires upon himself, and my care was cast upon him alone."[198]
[198]
George Fox: Journal,
Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59-61, abridged.
A
genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a
heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman.
If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it
becomes a definite and labeled heresy.
But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over
persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become
an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over:
the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and
stone the prophets in their turn. The
new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be
henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the
spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the
fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.
Unless, indeed, by adopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital
out of them and use them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective
action of this politic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealings of
the Roman ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield
examples enough for our instruction.
The
plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in
water-tight compartments. Religious
after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their
religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain.
The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus,
almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to
religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion.
And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to
religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the
passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in
theoretic system. The
ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of
dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal
or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the
purely interior life which are the exclusive object of our study.
The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the
stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and
the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human
neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that
inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as
aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators.
Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct.
You believe as little as I do, in spite of the Christian unction with
which the German emperor addressed his troops upon their way to China, that
the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went
beyond them, had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of
those concerned in the performance.
Well,
no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we make piety
responsible. At most we may
blame piety for not availing to check our natural passions, and sometimes
for supplying them with hypocritical pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes
obligations, and with the pretext usually couples some restriction; and when
the passion gust is over, the piety may bring a reaction of repentance which
the irreligious natural man would not have shown.
For
many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her charge,
religion as such, then, is not to blame.
Yet of the charge that over-zealousness or fanaticism is one of her
liabilities we cannot wholly acquit her, so I will next make a remark upon
that point. But I will preface
it by a preliminary remark which connects itself with much that follows. Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has
unquestionably produced in your minds an impression of extravagance. Is it
necessary, some of you have asked, as one example after another came before
us, to be quite so fantastically good as that?
We who have no vocation for the extremer ranges of sanctity will
surely be let off at the last day if our humility, asceticism, and
devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort.
This practically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to
admire in this field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious
phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of the
golden mean. Political
reformers accomplish their successive tasks in the history of nations by
being blind for the time to other causes.
Great schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission
to reveal, at the cost of a one-sidedness for which other schools must make
amends. We accept a John
Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a kind of
indulgence. We are glad they
existed to show us that way, but we are glad there are also other ways of
seeing and taking life. So of
many of the saints whom we have looked at.
We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme,
but we shrink from advising others to follow the example. The conduct we blame ourselves for not following lies nearer
to the middle line of human effort. It is less dependent on particular
beliefs and doctrines. It is
such as wears well in different ages, such as under different skies all
judges are able to commend.
The
fruits of religion, in other words, are, like all human products, liable to
corruption by excess. Common
sense must judge them. It need
not blame the votary; but it may be able to praise him only conditionally,
as one who acts faithfully according to his lights.
He shows us heroism in one way, but the unconditionally good way is
that for which no indulgence need be asked.
We find that error by excess is exemplified by every saintly virtue.
Excess, in human faculties, means usually one-sidedness or want of
balance; for it is hard to imagine an essential faculty too strong, if only
other faculties equally strong be there to cooperate with it in action.
Strong affections need a strong will; strong active powers need a
strong intellect; strong intellect needs strong sympathies, to keep life
steady. If the balance exist,
no one faculty can possibly be too strong--we only get the stronger
all-round character. In the
life of saints, technically so called, the spiritual faculties are strong,
but what gives the impression of extravagance proves usually on examination
to be a relative deficiency of intellect.
Spiritual excitement takes pathological forms whenever other
interests are too few and the intellect too narrow.
We find this exemplified by all the saintly attributes in
turn--devout love of God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray.
I will run over these virtues in succession.
First
of all let us take Devoutness. When
unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of ecclesiastical
ambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme.
When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the
feeling that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive
devotion, one of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the
devotion itself. To adequately
realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the one great merit of
the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities by which savage tribesmen
have from time immemorial exhibited their faithfulness to chieftains are now
outbid in favor of the deity. Vocabularies
are exhausted and languages altered in the attempt to praise him enough;
death is looked on as gain if it attract his grateful notice; and the
personal attitude of being his devotee becomes what one might almost call a
new and exalted kind of professional specialty within the tribe.[199] The
legends that gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits of this
impulse to celebrate and glorify. The
Buddha[200] and Mohammed[201] and their companions and many Christian saints
are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes which are meant to be
honorific, but are simply abgeschmackt and silly, and form a touching
expression of man's misguided propensity to praise.
[199]
Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint Francis to
Christ's wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ's childhood; Saint Bernard
to his humanity; Saint Teresa to Saint Joseph, etc. The Shi-ite Mohammedans venerate Ali, the Prophet's
son-in-law, instead of Abu-bekr, his brother-in-law.
Vambery describes a dervish whom he met in Persia, "who had
solemnly vowed, thirty years before, that he would never employ his organs
of speech otherwise but in uttering, everlastingly, the name of his
favorite, Ali, Ali. He thus
wished to signify to the world that he was the most devoted partisan of that
Ali who had been dead a thousand years.
In his own home, speaking with his wife, children, and friends, no
other word but 'Ali!' ever passed his lips.
If he wanted food or drink or anything else, he expressed his wants
still by repeating 'Ali!' Begging
or buying at the bazaar, it was always 'Ali!'
Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on his monotonous
'Ali!' Latterly his zeal
assumed such tremendous proportions that, like a madman, he would race, the
whole day, up and down the streets of the town, throwing his stick high up
into the air, and shriek our, all the while, at the top of his voice, 'Ali!'
This dervish was venerated by everybody as a saint, and received
everywhere with the greatest distinction." Arminius Vambery, his Life and Adventures, written by
Himself, London, 1889, p. 69. On
the anniversary of the death of Hussein, Ali's son, the Shi-ite Moslems
still make the air resound with cries of his name and Ali's.
[200]
Compare H. C. Warren: Buddhism
in Translation, Cambridge, U.S., 1898, passim.
[201]
Compare J. L. Merrick: The Life
and Religion of Mohammed, as contained in the Sheeah traditions of the
Hyat-ul-Kuloob, Boston. 1850, passim.
An
immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy for the deity's
honor. How can the devotee show
his loyalty better than by sensitiveness in this regard? The slightest affront or neglect must be resented, the
deity's enemies must be put to shame. In
exceedingly narrow minds and active wills, such a care may become an
engrossing preoccupation; and crusades have been preached and massacres
instigated for no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon the God.
Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and
churches with imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper to a
glow, so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated
by some of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its
besetting sins. The saintly
temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper has often to be cruel.
It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel.
Between his own and Jehovah's enemies a David knows no difference; a
Catherine of Siena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians which was
the scandal of her epoch, can think of no better method of union among them
than a crusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds no word of protest or
regret over the atrocious tortures with which the Anabaptist leaders were
put to death; and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies
into his hands for "execution."
Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds the partnership
not quite unnatural. So, when "freethinkers" tell us that religion and
fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of the charge.
Fanaticism
must then be inscribed on the wrong side of religion's account, so long as
the religious person's intellect is on the stage which the despotic kind of
God satisfies. But as soon as
the God is represented as less intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases
to be a danger.
Fanaticism
is found only where the character is masterful and aggressive.
In gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and the intellect
feeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the
exclusion of all practical human interests, which, though innocent enough,
is too one-sided to be admirable. A mind too narrow has room but for one kind of affection.
When the love of God takes possession of such a mind, it expels all
human loves and human uses. There
is no English name for such a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to
it as a theopathic condition.
The
blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example.
"To
be loved here upon the earth," her recent biographer exclaims:
"to be loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be
loved with fidelity, with devotion--what enchantment! But to be loved by
God! and loved by him to distraction [aime jusqu'a la folie]!--Margaret
melted away with love at the thought of such a thing.
Like Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint Francis
Xavier, she said to God: 'Hold
back, O my God, these torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my
capacity for their reception."[202]
[202]
Bougaud: Hist. de la
bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, p. 145.
The
most signal proofs of God's love which Margaret Mary received were her
hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most signal in turn of
these were the revelations of Christ's sacred heart, "surrounded with
rays more brilliant than the Sun, and transparent like a crystal.
The wound which he received on the cross visibly appeared upon it.
There was a crown of thorns round about this divine Heart, and a
cross above it." At the
same time Christ's voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames
of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread the
knowledge of them. He thereupon
took out her mortal heart, placed it inside of his own and inflamed it, and
then replaced it in her breast, adding:
"Hitherto thou hast taken the name of my slave, hereafter thou
shalt be called the well-beloved disciple of my Sacred Heart."
In
a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail the "great
design" which he wished to establish through her instrumentality.
"I ask of thee to bring it about that every first Friday after
the week of holy Sacrament shall be made into a special holy day for
honoring my Heart by a general communion and by services intended to make
honorable amends for the indignities which it has received.
And I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed with abundance
the influences of its love upon all those who pay to it these honors, or who
bring it about that others do the same."
"This
revelation," says Mgr. Bougaud, "is unquestionably the most
important of all the revelations which have illumined the Church since that
of the Incarnation and of the Lord's Supper. . . .
After the Eucharist, the supreme effort of the Sacred
Heart."[203] Well, what
were its good fruits for Margaret Mary's life?
Apparently little else but sufferings and prayers and absences of
mind and swoons and ecstasies. She
became increasingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ's
love--
"which
grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable of attending to
external duties. They tried her
in the infirmary, but without much success, although her kindness, zeal, and
devotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such a heroism
that our readers would not bear the recital of them.
They tried her in the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as
hopeless--everything dropped out of her hands.
The admirable humility with which she made amends for her clumsiness
could not prevent this from being prejudicial to the order and regularity
which must always reign in a community. They put her in the school, where
the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces out of her clothes [for
relics] as if she were already a saint, but where she was too absorbed
inwardly to pay the necessary attention.
Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than before them was
she a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her in her heaven."[204]
[203]
Bougaud: Hist. de la
bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp. 365, 241.
[204]
Bougaud: Op. cit., p. 267.
Poor
dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual outlook
that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and modern
education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship
which she embodies. A lower
example still of theopathic saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a
Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, whose "Revelations," a
well-known mystical authority, consist mainly of proofs of Christ's
partiality for her undeserving person.
Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of
the most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an
individual, form the tissue of this paltry-minded recital.[205] In reading
such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the
twentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield
almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior
intellectual sympathies. What
with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to need
a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being interested
exclusively in dealing out personal favors, with whom our ancestors were so
contented. Smitten as we are
with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but
adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an
essential element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood of
former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us
curiously shallow and unedifying.
[205]
Examples: "Suffering from
a headache, she sought, for the glory of God, to relieve herself by holding
certain odoriferous substances in her mouth, when the Lord appeared to her
to lean over towards her lovingly, and to find comfort Himself in these
odors. After having gently
breathed them in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to the Saints, as
if contented with what He had done: 'see the new present which my betrothed
has given Me!'
"One
day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sung the words 'Sanctus, Sanctus,
Sanctus.' The son of God leaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving
to her soul the softest kiss, said to her at the second Sanctus:
'In this Sanctus addressed to my person, receive with this kiss all
the sanctity of my divinity and of my humanity, and let it be to thee a
sufficient preparation for approaching the communion table.' And the next
following Sunday, while she was thanking God for this favor, behold the Son
of God, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in His arms as if
He were proud of her and presents her to God the Father, in that perfection
of sanctity with which He had dowered her.
And the Father took such delight in this soul thus presented by His
only son, that, as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gave her, and
the Holy Ghost gave her also, the sanctity attributed to each by His own
Sanctus--and thus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of the
blessing of Sanctity, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by Wisdom, and by
Love." Revelations de
Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898, i. 44, 186.
Take
Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many respects, of
whose life we have the record. She
had a powerful intellect of the practical order.
She wrote admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a will equal to
any emergency, great talent for politics and business, a buoyant
disposition, and a first-rate literary style.
She was tenaciously aspiring, and put her whole life at the service
of her religious ideals. Yet so
paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking, that (although
I know that others have been moved differently) I confess that my only
feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality of soul should
have found such poor employment.
In
spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor of
superficiality about her genius. A
Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan, has divided the human race into two
types, whom he calls "shrews" and "nonshrews"
respectively.[206] The shrew-type is defined as possessing an "active
unimpassioned temperament." In
other words, shrews are the "motors," rather than the "sensories,"[207]
and their expressions are as a rule more energetic than the feelings which
appear to prompt them. Saint
Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in
this sense of the term. The
bustle of her style, as well as of her life, proves it.
Not only must she receive unheard-of personal favors and spiritual
graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about them and
exploiter them professionally, and use her expertness to give instruction to
those less privileged. Her
voluble egotism; her sense, not of radical bad being, as the really contrite
have it, but of her "faults" and "imperfections" in the
plural; her stereotyped humility and return upon herself, as covered with
"confusion" at each new manifestation of God's singular partiality
for a person so unworthy, are typical of shrewdom:
a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in gratitude,
and silent. She had some public
instincts, it is true; she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church's
triumph over them; but in the main her idea of religion seems to have been
that of an endless amatory flirtation--if one may say so without
irreverence-- between the devotee and the deity; and apart from helping
younger nuns to go in this direction by the inspiration of her example and
instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general
human interest. Yet the spirit
of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.
[206]
Furneaux Jordan: Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition. Later
editions change the nomenclature.
[207]
As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M.
Baldwin's little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.
We
have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based on
merits. Any God who, on the one
hand, can care to keep a pedantically minute account of individual
shortcomings, and on the other can feel such partialities, and load
particular creatures with such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a
God for our credence. When
Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very
notion of a debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty,
he stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility.
So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions
which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.
The
next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity.
In theopathic characters, like those whom we have just considered,
the love of God must not be mixed with any other love.
Father and mother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as
interfering distractions; for sensitiveness and narrowness, when they occur
together, as they often do, require above all things a simplified world to
dwell in. Variety and confusion
are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation.
But whereas your aggressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by
forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches
his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a
smaller world in which he dwells himself and from which he eliminates it
altogether. Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons,
dragonnades, and inquisition methods, we have the church fugient, as one
might call it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian
organizations, both churches pursuing the same object--to unify the
life,[208] and simplify the spectacle presented to the soul.
A mind extremely sensitive to inner discords will drop one external
relation after another, as interfering with the absorption of consciousness
in spiritual things. Amusements
must go first, then conventional "society," then business, then
family duties, until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into
hours for stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne.
The lives of saints are a history of successive renunciations of
complication, one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after
another, to save the purity of inner tone.[209] "Is it not better," a young sister asks her
Superior, "that I should not speak at all during the hour of
recreation, so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin
of which I might not be conscious?"[210]
If the life remains a social one at all, those who take part in it
must follow one identical rule.
Embosomed
in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more.
The minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian
communities, whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a
man of the world. Costume,
phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped, and there is no
doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this stability an
incomparable kind of mental rest.
[208]
On this subject I refer to the work of M. Murisier (Les Maladies du
sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the
mainspring of the whole religious life.
But ALL strongly ideal interests, religious or irreligious, unify the
mind and tend to subordinate everything to themselves.
One would infer from M. Murisier's pages that this formal condition
was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison
almost neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the present work will convince the reader that
religion has plenty of material content which is characteristic and which is
more important by far than any general psychological form.
In spite of this criticism, I find M. Murisier's book highly
instructive. [209] Example:
"At the first beginning of the Servitor's [Suso's] interior
life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he marked out
for himself, in thought, three circles, within which he shut himself up, as
in a spiritual intrenchment. The
first circle was his cell, his chapel, and the choir.
When he was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete
security. The second circle was the whole monastery as far as the outer
gate. The third and outermost
circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for him to stand well
upon his guard. When he went
outside these circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some
wild animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and
therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness."
The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by Knox,
London, 1865, p. 168.
[210]
Vie des premieres Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congregation de St.
Dominique, a Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129.
We
have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of Saint Louis of
Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification.
I
think you will agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external
and discordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire.
At the age of ten, his biographer says:--
"The
inspiration came to him to consecrate to the Mother of God his own
virginity--that being to her the most agreeable of possible presents.
Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was in him, joyous
of heart, and burning with love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity.
Mary accepted the offering of his innocent heart, and obtained for
him from God, as a recompense, the extraordinary grace of never feeling
during his entire life the slightest touch of temptation against the virtue
of purity. This was an altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded
even to Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in that Louis dwelt
always in courts and among great folks, where danger and opportunity are so
unusually frequent. It is true
that Louis from his earliest childhood had shown a natural repugnance for
whatever might be impure or unvirginal, and even for relations of any sort
whatever between persons of opposite sex.
But this made it all the more surprising that he should, especially
since this vow, feel it necessary to have recourse to such a number of
expedients for protecting against even the shadow of danger the virginity
which he had thus consecrated. One
might suppose that if any one could have contented himself with the ordinary
precautions, prescribed for all Christians, it would assuredly have been he.
But no! In the use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight
from the most insignificant occasions, from every possibility of peril, just
as in the mortification of his flesh, he went farther than the majority of
saints. He, who by an
extraordinary protection of God's grace was never tempted, measured all his
steps as if he were threatened on every side by particular dangers.
Thenceforward he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the
streets, or when in society. Not
only did he avoid all business with females even more scrupulously than
before, but he renounced all conversation and every kind of social
recreation with them, although his father tried to make him take part; and
he commenced only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of
every kind."[211]
[211]
Meschler's Life of Saint Louis of Gonzaga, French translation by Lebrequier,
1891, p. 40.
At
the age of twelve, we read of this young man that "if by chance his
mother sent one of her maids of honor to him with a message, he never
allowed her to come in, but listened to her through the barely opened door,
and dismissed her immediately. He
did not like to be alone with his own mother, whether at table or in
conversation; and when the rest of the company withdrew, he sought also a
pretext for retiring. . . . Several
great ladies, relatives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight;
and he made a sort of treaty with his father, engaging promptly and readily
to accede to all his wishes, if he might only be excused from all visits to
ladies." [212]
[212]
Ibid., p. 71.
When
he was seventeen years old Louis joined the Jesuit order,[213] against his
father's passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house; and
when a year later the father died, he took the loss as a "particular
attention" to himself on God's part, and wrote letters of stilted good
advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother.
He soon became so good a monk that if any one asked him the number of
his brothers and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before
replying. A Father asked him
one day if he were never troubled by the thought of his family, to which,
"I never think of them except when praying for them," was his only
answer. Never was he seen to
hold in his hand a flower or anything perfumed, that he might take pleasure
in it. On the contrary, in the
hospital, he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting, and eagerly
snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc., from the hands of his companions.
He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn every
conversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained silent.
He systematically refused to notice his surroundings.
Being ordered one day to bring a book from the rector's seat in the
refectory, he had to ask where the rector sat, for in the three months he
had eaten bread there, so carefully did he guard his eyes that he had not
noticed the place. One day,
during recess, having looked by chance on one of his companions, he
reproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty.
He cultivated silence, as preserving from sins of the tongue; and his
greatest penance was the limit which his superiors set to his bodily
penances. He sought after false accusations and unjust reprimands as
opportunities of humility; and such was his obedience that, when a
room-mate, having no more paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel free
to give it to him without first obtaining the permission of the superior,
who, as such, stood in the place of God, and transmitted his orders.
[213]
In his boyish note-book he praises the monastic life for its freedom from
sin, and for the imperishable treasures, which it enables us to store up,
"of merit in God's eyes which makes of Him our debtor for all
Eternity." Loc. cit., p.
62.
I
can find no other sorts of fruit than these of Louis's saintship.
He died in 1591, in his twenty-ninth year, and is known in the Church
as the patron of all young people. On
his festival, the altar in the chapel devoted to him in a certain church in
Rome "is embosomed in flowers, arranged with exquisite taste; and a
pile of letters may be seen at its foot, written to the Saint by young men
and women, and directed to 'Paradiso.' They are supposed to be burnt unread
except by San Luigi, who must find singular petitions in these pretty little
missives, tied up now with a green ribbon, expressive of hope, now with a
red one, emblematic of love," etc.[214]
[214]
Mademoiselle Mori, a novel quoted in Hare's Walks in Rome, 1900, i. 55.
I
cannot resist the temptation to quote from Starbuck's book, p. 388, another
case of purification by elimination. It
runs as follows:--
"The
signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of frequent
occurrence. They get out of
tune with other people; often they will have nothing to do with churches,
which they regard as worldly; they become hypercritical towards others; they
grow careless of their social, political, and financial obligations.
As an instance of this type may be mentioned a woman of sixty-eight
of whom the writer made a special study.
She had been a member of one of the most active and progressive
churches in a busy part of a large city.
Her pastor described her as having reached the censorious stage.
She had grown more and more out of sympathy with the church; her
connection with it finally consisted simply in attendance at prayer-meeting,
at which her only message was that of reproof and condemnation of the others
for living on a low plane. At
last she withdrew from fellowship with any church.
The writer found her living alone in a little room on the top story
of a cheap boarding-house quite out of touch with all human relations, but
apparently happy in the enjoyment of her own spiritual blessings.
Her time was occupied in writing booklets on sanctification--page
after page of dreamy rhapsody. She
proved to be one of a small group of persons who claim that entire salvation
involves three steps instead of two; not only must there be conversion and
sanctification, but a third, which they call 'crucifixion' or 'perfect
redemption,' and which seems to bear the same relation to sanctification
that this bears to conversion. She
related how the Spirit had said to her, 'Stop going to church.
Stop going to holiness meetings.
Go to your own room and I will teach you.' She professes to care
nothing for colleges, or preachers, or churches, but only cares to listen to
what God says to her. Her
description of her experience seemed entirely consistent; she is happy and
contented, and her life is entirely satisfactory to herself.
While listening to her own story, one was tempted to forget that it
was from the life of a person who could not live by it in conjunction with
her fellows."
Our
final judgment of the worth of such a life as this will depend largely on
our conception of God, and of the sort of conduct he is best pleased with in
his creatures. The Catholicism
of the sixteenth century paid little heed to social righteousness; and to
leave the world to the devil whilst saving one's own soul was then accounted
no discreditable scheme. To-day,
rightly or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairs is, in consequence
of one of those secular mutations in moral sentiment of which I spoke,
deemed an essential element of worth in character; and to be of some public
or private use is also reckoned as a species of divine service. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them,
the Xaviers, Brebeufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and fought in their way
for the world's welfare; so their lives to-day inspire us.
But when the intellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger
than a pin's head, and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness,
the result, notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole
repulsive. Purity, we see in
the object-lesson, is NOT the one thing needful; and it is better that a
life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its
efforts to remain unspotted.
Proceeding
onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next come upon excesses
of Tenderness and Charity. Here
saintliness has to face the charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding
parasites and beggars. "Resist
not evil," "Love your enemies," these are saintly maxims of
which men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are the
men of this world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range
of truth?
No
simple answer is possible. Here,
if anywhere, one feels the complexity of the moral life, and the
mysteriousness of the way in which facts and ideals are interwoven.
Perfect
conduct is a relation between three terms:
the actor, the objects for which he acts, and the recipients of the
action. In order that conduct
should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, and
reception, should be suited to one another.
The best intention will fail if it either work by false means or
address itself to the wrong recipient.
Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine
himself to the actor's animus alone, apart from the other elements of the
performance. As there is no
worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable
arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice,
are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by
his trustfulness. He may by
non-resistance cut off his own survival.
Herbert
Spencer tells us that the perfect man's conduct will appear perfect only
when the environment is perfect: to
no inferior environment is it suitably adapted.
We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that saintly conduct
would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an environment where all
were saints already; but by adding that in an environment where few are
saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted. We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common
sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is,
the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have
been, manifested in excess.
The
powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them.
The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence
of the failure of simply giving alms. The
whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence
of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not
turning the other cheek also.
You
will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of
Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in
shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and
swindlers.
And
yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these
hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there
no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he
were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the
wronger's person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live
always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and
impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an
infinitely worse place than it is now to live in.
The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be
born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the
perspective of our imaginations.
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